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Bill O’Reilly’s Outdated ‘Killing Kennedy’

October 13, 2012

Exclusive: Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and co-author Martin Dugard are hoping for another financial “killing” with their Killing Kennedy. But the new book may have a bigger agenda, solidifying popular history behind the Warren Report on JFK’s murder and tearing down his character, writes Jim DiEugenio.

By Jim DiEugenio

A long time ago, Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly was a high school history teacher. Martin Dugard was an author who had written a few history books, e.g. about Christopher Columbus and Stanley and Livingstone. Last year, the two men collaborated on a book about the murder of President Abraham Lincoln. Killing Lincoln proved to be a “killing” in another way, a financial one.

This year is the 49th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy. Several writers and film producers are already preparing major projects for the 50th anniversary next year. It seems that O’Reilly and Dugard decided to get the jump on the occasion by trying to repeat the success of their book about Lincoln, thus, we have Killing Kennedy.

But the Kennedy case is not the Lincoln case. The Lincoln case is one that has settled into history. The incredible thing about the murder of President Kennedy is that, 49 years later, we are still discovering things that the government has tried to keep secret about the case.

For instance, just a few months ago it was learned that the Air Force One tapes at the National Archives were incomplete. They had been edited to eliminate a reference to a query about the location of Air Force General Curtis LeMay as President Kennedy’s body was being returned from Dallas.

This made the news since historians understand that LeMay and Kennedy knocked heads during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but also because there have been reports that, for whatever reason, LeMay was present during the Kennedy autopsy at Bethesda Medical Center that evening.

I mention this not only to show that there are still important secrets seeping out about the murder of President Kennedy, but also because you will not find a word about any significant new evidence in this book. In fact, in regards to the actual murder of President Kennedy, this is a book that could have been written in 1965. I could find very little, if anything, pertaining to the actual assassination that was discovered in later decades.

Which poses a question: Besides the obvious opportunity to cash in, what is the book’s purpose? It seems to be to re-sell the Warren Commission Report’s initial assessment of the assassination to a new audience in a new millennium, except in an abridged version, jazzed up with some novelistic writing and some juicy tales of extramarital sex.

This book upholds every dubious central tenet of the Warren Report. It says that Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy by himself; that Jack Ruby then marched down the Main Street ramp of the Dallas Police station and killed Oswald alone and unaided; and that neither man knew each other or was part of a larger conspiracy.

In other words, even though 4 million pages of material have been declassified since 1964, none of this matters in the least to O’Reilly and Dugard. In Killing Kennedy, the Warren Commission got it right way back then and the hundreds of trenchant and book-length critiques of its faulty investigation aren’t worth considering.

Indeed, one of the most startling things about the O’Reilly/Dugard book is its heavy reliance on the Warren Report because, since 1964, there have been other major official inquiries that have shown that the Warren Commission was not just a flawed inquiry, but that it was deprived of crucial information. With important pieces of the puzzle missing, the commission’s conclusions were surely questionable.

Selective History

Given Official Washington’s contempt for New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, I guess it’s not surprising that O’Reilly and Dugard never mention his investigation or the discoveries he made about Lee Oswald’s activities in New Orleans in the summer 1963. But they also ignore congressional inquiries, such as the 1975 Church Committee review by Senators Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart into the failure of the FBI and CIA to fully inform the Warren Commission of relevant facts.

Then, there was the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was in session from 1976-79 and concluded that there likely was a second gunman in Kennedy’s murder.

In the 1990s, public interest in the case was renewed by Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” and especially its dramatic use of the Zapruder film of the kill shot knocking Kennedy’s head backwards when Oswald was behind, not in front, of the motorcade. That forced the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which from 1994 to 1998 declassified about 2 million pages of documents that had been either completely hidden or severely redacted prior to that time.

Much of this information was extremely interesting, shocking or explosive especially as it related to Oswald’s curious relationship with U.S. intelligence and right-wing activists.

Yet, in spite of all this, O’Reilly and Dugard term the Warren Report one of the backbones of their work (p. 306) and treat its conclusions as comparable in certainty to the evidence that John Wilkes Booth killed President Lincoln in 1865.

This indicates two things: 1.) Their research was not in any way complete or in-depth, and 2.) The book was agenda driven from the start. For to eliminate all this new information amounts to depriving readers of new evidence that challenges the Warren Commission’s conclusions. The book wipes away all uncertainty about the mystery.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the depiction of Lee Harvey Oswald. Since the time of the Garrison investigation, until the discoveries about the CIA and Oswald in the declassified files of the ARRB, there has literally been a running stream of evidence to contradict the narrow and deliberately constricted portrait of Oswald in the Warren Report.

In fact, it has been revealed that, tipped off by Warren Commissioner (and former CIA Director) Allen Dulles, the FBI and CIA rehearsed their responses about Oswald’s ties to the intelligence community. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 323) That portrait was of the sociopathic loner who, frustrated in his own personal and professional ambitions, decided to release his anger by killing President Kennedy.

The problem with trying to maintain that stance today is that there is so much evidence to vitiate it. For example, although the authors briefly mention Oswald in New Orleans, they never bring up the address of 544 Camp Street, the address rubber-stamped on at least one of the pamphlets that was in Oswald’s possession in the summer of 1963.

When Garrison discovered this, he walked down to the address and found that it was also the address that housed the private detective offices of Guy Banister, an FBI veteran who had retired and later opened up an investigative service in New Orleans.

Mostly Banister monitored the activities of what he thought were leftist organizations, i.e. socialists, integrationists, communists and pro-Castro sympathizers. He often employed undercover agents to keep tabs on these groups. Both Garrison and the HSCA interviewed several witnesses who stated that they saw Oswald at Banister’s. Some of these witnesses said that Banister actually gave Oswald an office.

Therefore, Garrison thought Oswald made a dumb mistake by putting the address where he was supposed to be working undercover on this document. And we know from a declassified HSCA interview with Banister’s secretary that Banister was very upset when he found out Oswald had done this.

What makes this information even more tantalizing are two other factors: One of the pamphlets that Oswald stamped Banister’s address on was called “The Crime Against Cuba,” a document written by New York activist Corliss Lamont. It became exceedingly popular and went through at least five printings by 1967. But the one Oswald had in New Orleans was from the first printing, which was done in 1961. But Oswald could not have ordered this copy then since he was in the Soviet Union at the time. However, the CIA did order 45 copies of the first edition in 1961. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 219)

And, two, what makes that fact even more interesting is a discovery made through the declassified files of the ARRB that the CIA had decided to run a counter-intelligence program against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1961. This included electronic surveillance, interception of mail, and, most importantly in regards to Oswald, the planting of double agents inside that organization. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pgs. 236-243)

This CIA program was supervised by James McCord (who later surfaced as one of the Watergate burglars) and David Phillips, who was reportedly seen in New Orleans at Banister’s office and at the Southland Center in Dallas with Oswald. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, pgs. 168, 183) Therefore, from these links, it is possible Oswald got the outdated Corliss Lamont pamphlet through Phillips via Banister.

Most people today would consider the above to be relevant information about Oswald, though not a whiff of it was in the Warren Commission and today, 48 years later, none of it is in the O’Reilly/Dugard book.

The Mexico Trip

The authors also briefly touch on Oswald’s purported trip to Mexico City. Yet again, they essentially crib from the Warren Report and ignore the thousands of declassified pages by the ARRB. And this includes the remarkable 400-page Lopez Report done for the HSCA in the late 1970s.

O’Reilly and Dugard simply state that Oswald went to Mexico to get a visa to Cuba, which is not entirely accurate. It ignores the fact that Oswald, or someone claiming to be him, also visited the Soviet consulate in addition to the Cuban consulate. The actual objective was to gain an in-transit visa to Cuba with the ultimate destination, Russia.

But this is just the beginning of what O’Reilly and Dugard do with Mexico City. The authors describe an argument between Oswald and Cuban consulate officer Eusebio Azcue. (p. 219) What they do not say is again rather important. Azcue went to the movies two weeks after the assassination and saw a newsreel of Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby. Azcue was stunned because the man he saw being shot in the newsreel was not the man he argued with in Mexico City. (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 348)

Further, Sylvia Duran, the Cuban receptionist in Mexico City who talked the most to the man called Oswald, later said the same thing. She said the man she talked to was short, about 5’ 4’” tall, and had blonde hair. (ibid, p. 351) This does not describe Oswald.

There was a third witness in this regard, Oscar Contreras, a young man studying to be a lawyer at National University in Mexico City. Oswald had gone to the university cafeteria and was sitting next to him and his friends. He later struck up a conversation with Contreras about his inability to get a visa to Cuba. Later, Contreras stated that the man he talked to was not the Oswald shot in Dallas. (ibid, p. 352)

In passing, in relation to another subject, O’Reilly and Dugard point up another problem with Oswald in Mexico City. They admit that Oswald did not speak Spanish. Yet, in the tapes relayed to Washington by the CIA station in Mexico City, the man they say is Oswald spoke Spanish well. (Newman p. 335) Making this even stranger is that whoever this man on the tapes was, he spoke very poor, broken Russian. (ibid)

Again, every witness who knew Oswald testified that he spoke fluent Russian. Certifying this problem, when the CIA sent tapes and photos to Washington and they were shown and played for the FBI agents interviewing Oswald, the agents said this photo was not Oswald and the voice on the tapes was not the man they interviewed. (Newman, p. 520)

Any fair-minded reader, when confronted with this information, would conclude something was amiss with the CIA’s story about Oswald in Mexico City. But O’Reilly and Dugard just leave this evidence out.

The Case Against Oswald

Which brings us to the authors’ case against Oswald. One of the most serious problems the Warren Commission had in making a case against the accused assassin was that the evidence in Dealey Plaza required that the actual shooting of Kennedy take place in six seconds. In the space of those few seconds, three shots were fired. Two of the three were direct hits on a target moving away from the marksman at a slight angle.

But there were two complicating factors in making this case. When the Commission tried to duplicate this feat with first-class marksmen from the armed services, none of them could achieve the goal. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories Afterthe Fact, p.108)

Secondly, by no stretch of the imagination was Oswald a first-class rifleman. In fact, when author Henry Hurt interviewed dozens of Oswald’s Marine Corps colleagues, they were dumbfounded that the Warren Commission could state that Oswald could perform with such shooting skill because the Oswald they recalled was either a mediocre shot or worse.

For instance, Sherman Cooley said, “I saw that man shoot, and there’s no way he could have learned to shoot well enough to do what they accused him of.” (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 99) And Cooley was an expert hunter and excellent shot. Hurt concluded after interviewing several dozen Marines, “on the subject of Oswald’s shooting ability there was virtually no exception it was laughable.” (ibid)

How do O’Reilly and Dugard get around this barrier and make Oswald the sole assassin of President Kennedy? They do something that not even Vincent Bugliosi did in Reclaiming History. They simply change the facts and write that “Oswald was a crack shot in the military.” (p. 15)

When I read that, the book almost dropped out of my hands. A statement like that is not a distortion of the facts. It is a deception. The authors source this to the Warren Report. However, upon finding the relevant section, pages 681-82, the reader will see that nothing even approaching this kind of description appears on those pages.

For example, the Report says that “his practice scores were not very good,” and he scored two points above the minimum to qualify in the mid-range level for shooting ability. And from there he got worse before he left the Marines. There is no way, except on Fox News, that this qualifies as being a “crack shot.”

How intent are O’Reilly and Dugard on convicting Oswald for the reader? They leave out what many people think is the single most important piece of evidence in the Kennedy murder. Namely, the Zapruder film. The book spends several pages describing the shooting sequence in Dealey Plaza. But I could not find any mention of what the Zapruder film shows: Kennedy’s entire body rocketing backward with such force and speed that it bounces off the back seat.

This unforgettable sight takes place when Kennedy’s head is struck and a burst of blood and tissue explodes upward into the air. To any objective viewer it appears that it was this shot that caused Kennedy’s violent reaction.

In fact, when the Zapruder film was shown to the public for the first time in 1975 on ABC, this image created a firestorm of controversy that provoked the creation of a new investigation, namely the HSCA. Why? Because that sequence indicated a shot from the front, while Oswald and the Texas School Book Depository were behind.

I think I understand why the authors left out this gruesome fact, while including another memorable image from the Zapruder film. In a panic attack, Jackie Kennedy crawled onto the trunk of the car to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull that has just been blown out. (p. 271) If the book had described both actions, Kennedy’s body rocketing backwards and Jackie retrieving the piece of skull from the trunk, then the overwhelming impression would have been that Oswald was not the assassin, since the laws of physics suggest that a shot from behind would drive Kennedy’s head and skull fragments forward.

In describing the other shot that hit Kennedy, the one that has become known as the Magic Bullet, again the authors do something startling. They say that this bullet entered Kennedy at the level of his lower neck. (p. 266) Again, this is a deception. During the investigation by the HSCA, a medical panel reviewed the autopsy photographs of President Kennedy. An artist then duplicated the photos. Anyone can see that this shot did not enter the neck, but President Kennedy’s back. (Click here and scroll down http://www.celebritymorgue.com/jfk/jfk-autopsy.html)

O’Reilly and Dugard change this evidence for the same reason that Gerald Ford lied about this point in the Warren Report: to make it more feasible that this bullet, allegedly fired from six stories up, could hit Kennedy at this downward angle and still exit from his throat.

In order to preserve the story of the Magic Bullet, the authors then censor more important information. The book describes Dr. Malcolm Perry’s attempt to revive President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital by cutting a tracheotomy over his throat wound. (p. 276) What the authors omit is the fact that later on that day, during a press conference at the hospital, Perry said that this wound in the front of the neck was one of entrance and therefore could not have been fired from the rear. (See p. 256 of Dr. David Mantik’s essay, “The Medical Evidence Decoded” in Murder In Dealey Plaza, edited by James Fetzer.)

But further, O’Reilly and Dugard also say that no bones were struck in Kennedy by this bullet. (p. 266) Yet, as both Dr. Mantik and Dr. John Nichols have demonstrated (the latter at the trial of Clay Shaw) if one follows the measurements for this wound given in the Warren Commission, the cervical vertebrae would have had to have been struck. Yet, there is no evidence of this on the autopsy x-rays and photos. This is more evidence of the magical qualities of this bullet.

Method to the Distortions

Before leaving the mechanics of the actual assassination, let me note one more intriguing description given by the authors. Anyone familiar with the circumstances of the Kennedy case knows that in the Warren Commission scenario, Oswald was supposed to have constructed both a barricade of boxes behind him, and a small platform of boxes in front of him on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The latter was allegedly to conceal him from any intruder; the former was to supposedly rest and/or mount the weapon while awaiting the motorcade.

The problem with this is that fellow worker Bonnie Ray Williams testified that he was eating a chicken lunch on the sixth floor up until about 12: 20. (Meagher, p. 324) And secretary Carolyn Arnold saw Oswald on the second floor at about that same time. (Summers, p. 77) By eliminating this testimony, the authors avoid the obvious question: How could Oswald have moved all of those heavy boxes of books into place in just a matter of minutes? For if Arnold is correct, he could not have been on the landing below the sixth floor waiting for Williams to leave.

To top it all off, O’Reilly and Dugard now add in something that is utterly startling. Forgetting about the boxes in front of their assassin, they actually write that Oswald shot at President Kennedy from a standing position! (p. 264) Yet, photos taken that day reveal that the window at which the alleged sniper was firing from was raised only about 15 inches. (DiEugenio, p. 352) If Oswald were firing from a standing position, it’s likely the shot would have shattered the glass in the window, which it did not.

But, as we have seen, with O’Reilly and Dugard there is a method behind their distortions, deceptions and omissions. Here it seems to be that they want to rely on the testimony of Howard Brennan to give a description of the shooter to the police. As many have noted, including ex-prosecutor Robert Tanenbaum, if Oswald was kneeling down resting his rifle on the boxes, how could Brennan give a description of height and weight? (p. 280)

But there is a further problem with the alleged issuing of Brennan’s description. As Tanenbaum, former Deputy Counsel for the HSCA, has noted, Brennan allegedly gave his description to the Secret Service a few moments after the shooting. Yet, all the Secret Service agents were at Parkland Hospital with the president. So whom did Brennan actually talk to in Dealey Plaza? (Meagher, p. 10)

Let us now move to the culminating two murders that weekend, those of officer J. D. Tippit and the shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby. Needless to say, O’Reilly and Dugard write that it was Oswald alone who shot Tippit and it was the patriotic bar owner Ruby, alone and unaided, who shot Oswald.

Concerning the former, the authors ignore the new evidence in Barry Ernest’s book The Girl on the Stairs, in which he interviewed a Mrs. Wiggins who was a witness in the Tippit slaying. She certified by both a TV announcement and her own wall clock that the shooting took place at 1:06. She then said she saw the assailant flee the scene.

But the fact that the woman certified the time would eliminate Oswald as the killer, because the Warren Report stated that he left his rooming house at about 1:03, approximately a half hour after the assassination. (See, p. 163 of the Warren Report) It would be physically impossible, even for O’Reilly and Dugard, to get Oswald to traverse nine blocks in three minutes.

Again, the authors avoid this crucial point. Yet they do note something that highlights it. From the scene of the Tippit murder to the Texas Theater, where Oswald was apprehended, is eight blocks. Yet this book says it took Oswald 25 minutes to get there. And they have him running.

Killing Oswald

Killing Kennedy depicts Jack Ruby killing Oswald because of his outrage at what the alleged killer of Kennedy had done. But to eliminate any suspicion that Ruby had help in entering the Dallas Police basement on Sunday, Nov. 24, or had planned on killing Oswald 48 hours previous, the book curtails the picture of Ruby’s weekend.

O’Reilly and Dugard note that Ruby was at the midnight press conference held by DA Henry Wade on Friday night after the assassination. (p. 287) But they do not fully inform the reader of what Ruby did there. Looking to the entire world like a reporter in the back of the room, Ruby corrected Wade when he mistakenly named the group Oswald had solicited for in New Orleans. This was an important distinction because the group Wade named, the Free Cuba Committee, was an anti-Castro organization. (Summers, p. 457)

Killing Kennedy does not tell the reader that Ruby was also at the police station on Saturday. He was trying to get details of when the police were going to move Oswald to another jail. (ibid, p. 458) Then, on Sunday morning, there is more than one report that Ruby was at the Dallas Police station early in the morning, perhaps as early as 8:00 a.m. One of the sources was the kind of witness lawyers dream of having: a reverend (ibid, p. 460)

From all of the above, it would appear that Ruby was monitoring the station and trying to find out when Oswald was to be transferred. Did Ruby have help getting into the basement that Sunday morning in order to shoot Oswald? The Warren Report said Ruby came down the Main Street ramp and somehow evaded the guard there, Roy Vaughn, even though Vaughn knew Ruby.

But the HSCA discovered a new witness, one who appears to have been avoided by the Warren Commission. Sgt. Don Flusche told the new inquiry that there was no doubt in his mind that Ruby, whom he had known for years, did not walk down Main Street anywhere near the ramp because he was standing against his car at the time, which was parked across the street. (ibid, p. 462)

So how did Ruby get into the basement? The HSCA concluded that Ruby came down an alleyway at the side of the police station. In the middle of this alley is a door that opens to the ground floor of the building. From there he could have reached the basement. It turned out that the Dallas Police Department’s chief of security that day, Patrick Dean, had lied about this issue. He said the door could not be opened without a key. By interviewing three custodians, the HSCA proved this was false. It could be opened without a key “from the direction Ruby would have entered.” (ibid, p. 468)

I could go on and on in this regard. The book is literally strewn with errors of omission or commission on almost every page, much of the disinformation focused on solidifying long-term right-wing mythology against Kennedy as historical fact, from laying the full blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco at his doorstep to discounting his plans for withdrawing U.S. military forces from Vietnam.

On the latter point, at the time of his death, Kennedy had committed not one more American troop to Vietnam than when he was inaugurated. And he was in the act of withdrawing the advisers he and President Eisenhower had committed. It was Johnson who reversed this plan within three months with the writing of NSAM 288. This contained the plans for a massive air, land and sea war against Vietnam that included the use of tactical atomic weapons in case of Chinese intervention. This is something Kennedy would never have even entertained, let alone signed off on.

Regarding both JFK and another historical figure featured in the book Martin Luther King Jr. the authors throw in many stories about extramarital affairs. In using the likes of David Heymann and Seymour Hersh’s discredited book, The Dark Side of Camelot, they present the most extreme tales in this regard.

I have dealt with this issue concerning Kennedy in my long essay, “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” (See The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pgs. 324-73) Concerning King, many people who heard these alleged surveillance tapes, like journalist Ben Bradlee, felt they were created by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Which brings us to a real quandary. O’Reilly and Dugard spend many pages describing the alleged character flaws of Kennedy and King. But they spend next to none describing the much larger flaws of J. Edgar Hoover, longtime CIA Director Allen Dulles and President Johnson. I wonder why and there is a likely explanation.

For decades, it has been a strategic goal of the American Right to tear down the hero status of Kennedy and King, whereas there is no similar political need to disparage Hoover, Dulles and Johnson. So, a book that is designed to do several things at once cement the conventional wisdom about the Kennedy assassination in line with the original Warren Commission findings, pander to right-wing readers and make gobs of money would naturally ignore all the messy evidence of CIA and FBI wrongdoing and highlight the human frailties of Kennedy and King.

Thus, Killing Kennedy is just the latest example of O’Reilly’s lucrative decision to sell out, even on a topic that once appeared to draw his honest interest. Many years ago O’Reilly was the host of a syndicated program called Inside Edition that drew on his past acquaintance with Gaeton Fonzi, the late, great field investigator for both the Church Committee and the HSCA. Fonzi supplied O’Reilly with many interesting stories about the Kennedy case in the early 1990s when Oliver Stone’s film was creating a new furor about the case. The stories all pointed toward a conspiracy, and some still exist on YouTube today.

But then, O’Reilly was hired by longtime Republican operative Roger Ailes to work for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network. According to author Russ Baker, O’Reilly wanted to continue his investigative pieces on the JFK case at Fox, but these ambitions were quashed by Ailes, who had cut his teeth in politics as a media consultant for Kennedy’s archrival, Richard Nixon.

So today, O’Reilly’s work on the Kennedy case is contrary to what he did before. He even suggests the chief motive for his sell-out on page 313. He dedicates the book to his boss, Roger Ailes, whom he obsequiously calls “a brilliant, fearless warrior.”

That is a true confession. Too bad it came on the last page. If it came on the first page, we would have known that a supposed homicide investigation was being supervised by a political operative with an agenda to bend the history.

Jim DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era.

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78 comments for “Bill O’Reilly’s Outdated ‘Killing Kennedy’”

Morton Kurzweil

October 13, 2012 at 1:03 pm

The same religion, different sins.
Kennedy by commit adultery.
O’Reilly by bearing false witness, coveting his neighbor’s possessions, and above all, failing to understand that it is not for the O’Reillys of the world to mediate and interpret the moral acts of others.

annalisa

October 15, 2012 at 1:07 pm

It’s called the First Amendment, i.e, the right to have and express an opinion. You can take it or leave it, but he has the right to say it.

F. G. Sanford

October 13, 2012 at 1:39 pm

Bill famously blamed the most atrocious war crime of WWII on American Soldiers: the Malmedy Massacre. He claimed that it was the American Soldiers who massacred Germans. There was an outpouring of criticism of him for this despicable representation of the facts. Amazingly, a short tome later, he repeated the same falsehood to bolster another one of his specious arguments. No apology, no admission of mistake, no sense of shame. I guess Americans think that O’Reilly is the kind of guy who should have more money, so they’ll buy his book to make sure he gets it. Rewarding hypocrites for their false patriotism is the hallmark of the right wing. The moniker “chickenhawk” has never bothered them in the least.

Jym Allyn

October 13, 2012 at 1:48 pm

“Et tu, Brutus?”

I was feeling very comfortable this afternoon until I read this article. Part of the skill of maintaining one’s composure (or sanity) is putting “back under the bed” fears which might be irrational.

But the one rational conclusion I have about the “sins of Roger Ailes” is that if it is on Faux Noose, or comes from one of their puppets, then it is a lie.

Despite the massive anxieties caused by the details of Jim DiEugenio’s comments, if they disagree with the “facts” of Bill O’Reilly (and anyone else on Faux), they the disagreement must be Gospel.

If any of the details of Jim’s comments are true, then I am afraid.

I am very afraid.

Dawn Meredith

October 13, 2012 at 3:43 pm

Jym:

Jim’s article is totally true. Can I recommend a book: JFK and The Unspeakable Why He Died and Why It matters by James Douglass. In a field of truly great books on this case, several cited by Jim, most consider this the best.

Dawn

Robert McCabe

October 14, 2012 at 7:39 pm

Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers two of President Kennedy’s best friends rode in a car the day of the murder and saw the killers fire and were told to not say a word.This is well known information that O’Reilly if he had any decency would have included in his book.I don’t believe this book will go anywhere as so much of the truth is well known today.

Kenny Oâ€™Donnell, one of JFKâ€™s closest aides, told Tip Oâ€™Neil that he perjured himself in front of the Warren Commission by not saying he that heard two shots come from behind the stockade fence on the Grassy Knoll.

Dave Powers, another close aide also heard a shot from the FRONT; he was intentionally ignored by the Warren Commission con artists. Dave Powers and Kenney Oâ€™Odonnell were 2 of JFKâ€™s very closest aides.

Kenny Oâ€™Donnellâ€™s perjury, committed while under pressure from the FBI to lie:

Mr. SPECTER. And what was your reaction as to the source of the shots, if you had one?
Mr. O’DONNELL. My reaction in part is reconstruction—is that they came from the right rear. That would be my best judgment.

FROM MAN OF THE HOUSE, by Tip Oâ€™Neill, Random House: 1987. page 178:

I was never one of those people who had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commissionâ€™s report on the Presidentâ€™s death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny Oâ€™Donnell and a few other people at Jimmyâ€™s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination.
I was surprised to hear Oâ€™Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence.
“Thatâ€™s not what you told the Warren Commission,” I said.
“Youâ€™re right,” he replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard but they said it couldnâ€™t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didnâ€™t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.” “I canâ€™t believe it,” I said. “I wouldnâ€™t have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth.”
“Tip, you have to understand. The familyâ€”everybody wanted this thing behind them.”
Dave Powers was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as Oâ€™Donnellâ€™s.

Mr. SPECTER. And what was your reaction as to the source of the shots, if you had one?
Mr. O’DONNELL. My reaction in part is reconstruction—is that they came from the right rear. That would be my best judgment.

Jym, unfortunately, Jim’s comments are, as he himself indicated in so many words, just the tip of an iceberg. This case is dirty, bit OReilly’s sanitation of it stinks even more.

Jym Allyn

October 15, 2012 at 9:07 am

I am extremely glad that I came back to this page to read the additional comments.

Even though, the main thing that those comments accomplished was to INCREASE my level of anxiety.

While I believe belonging to a group that accepts any “Conspiracy Theory” is akin to Groucho Marx’s invitation to join the Beverly Hills County Club in which he replied that he “would not belong to any club that would have him as a member.”

Most recently scary is the article about a possible “hit” on one of our generals at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

What is stunning is to read all of the comments (below) from “whacko conspiracists” and to sense how rational and thoughtful they are as to their details and rationality. Thank you (ALL) for the details and insight of your comments. Although you are scaring the $hit out of me.

All of this reinforces my paranoid suspicion as to the “real reason” why Obama “blew” the first Presidential debate with Romney.

Colin Powell (who used to be the most trusted person in America) decided NOT to run for President because his wife did not want to be the widow of the first African-American President assassinated in office.

While all of the Kennedy-conspiracy theorists may have their suspicions about a CIA-involved conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, President Obama likely has details that would either refute or validate those suspicions. If those details validate the suspicions, it is likely that President Obama was THE most terrified person in the room as he was acknowledging the 20th anniversary of marrying Michelle.

If he is not assertive enough in the debate, and Romney wins, then he gets to enjoy the perks of being the ex-President as exemplified by Bill Clinton.

If he says too much, too well, and wins the Presidency, then Michelle might become a widow.

That distraction could have had a far more significant impact on Obama’s weak presentation that the purported effect of the higher altitude of Denver.

And “thank you” (ALL) for (what I hope will be) the next four years of Presidential anxiety.

Guy Montag

October 13, 2012 at 1:58 pm

What a joke. For anyone who still believes in the official fairytale that ‘Oswald did it,’ ask yourself this: how is it that at the height of the Cold War, Oswald went to Russia, supposedly defected and threatened to give away military secrets, but when he came back to America, he was not arrested at the airport and imprisoned as a traitor? And with a Russian wife in tow whose Uncle was in the KGB? At a time when you could be blacklisted for even knowing anyone with supposed communist ties. That single fact alone should make it glaringly obvious that Oswald was an agent of the US intelligence services and never actually defected. Why are his tax returns still classified? Why has the CIA still refused to release records about George Joannides, the agent in charge of the DRE, who many researchers suspect might have been Oswald’s handler?

Betty Harris

October 13, 2012 at 2:07 pm

Read FAMILY OF SECRETS if you want some serious information.

Guy Montag

October 13, 2012 at 2:11 pm

I agree – that, and Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation if you want to know how the government never wanted a serious investigation of the assassination

Dawn Meredith

October 13, 2012 at 3:45 pm

I concur!
Dawn

Jack

October 13, 2012 at 3:11 pm

O’Reilly is a liar, partisan hack, and propagandist in the extreme. It’s also meant to deter and intimidate people not to question official government accounts of events, of which he and his fellow liars and shills at FOX help shape and sell to the public. A totally useless book and a waste of perfectly good paper.

Cassandra

October 13, 2012 at 11:00 pm

I think it is time to state the obvious: Bill O’Reilly is bought and paid for by the CIA.

Robert McCabe

October 15, 2012 at 12:56 pm

Everybody in media is.

annalisa

October 15, 2012 at 1:10 pm

Well that just tears it for me.

November 17

October 13, 2012 at 4:02 pm

The JFK assassination is no longer a mystery. The U.S. military and the CIA murdered our President.

After Howard Hunt (of the CIA) was linked to the Watergate break-in, Alexander Haig (a top Nixon aide) was quickly linked to Howard Hunt. Both men had worked on ultra-covert CIA operations against Castro and Cuba in the early sixties, so it was an easy connection to make.

But the CIA will never share this information. The direct link between the military (Haig) and the Agency (Hunt) will be guarded forever. This is what makes the CIA the CIA — they never share this kind of information. They never expose the contacts upon which the community is built. But we no longer need their help to understand the JFK assassination.

The story is very simple: In 1962 and 1963, Alexander Haig, working in a CIA capacity as an aide to Army Secretary Cyrus Vance, arranged for Howard Hunt to serve as the mastermind. Together they turned a supposed anti-Castro assassination plot into an anti-Kennedy assassination plot. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, it was an easy sell.

Nine years later, when Howard Hunt was linked to the Watergate break-in, Alexander Haig used people like Bob Woodward to steer the investigations away from the CIA and towards Richard Nixon’s reelection committee. But Hunt was never a reelection committee operative. He was always a CIA operative. Do the math. Better late than never.

If you’ve been wondering what could possibly be in all of those still-classified JFK & Watergate CIA files, now you know. It’s all about the intelligence contacts. The classified files explain who knew whom.

It is interesting to learn of reports that Curtis Le May (1906-90, Chief of the US Air Staff 1961-65) was present at the autopsy on President Jack Kennedy (1917-63).
The following is from a piece I wrote in an Australian legal journal, Justinian, on February 11, 2010:
Le May was criminally insane; he recommended using genocide to win the cold war. And capable of treason: he told staff that Kennedy should be removed for not letting him bomb Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis.
Le May inspired three memorable characters:
* General James Mattoon Scott, who plotted a military coup in Fletcher Knebelâ€™s 1962 novel Seven Days in May. Kennedy lent encouragement for a film to be made of the book, but it came out too late, in 1964. Burt Lancaster played Scott in the film.
* General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) in Dr Strangelove (1963). He said (of Russian retaliation for a pre-emptive nuclear strike): â€œMr. President, Iâ€™m not saying we wouldnâ€™t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops, depending on the breaks.â€
* General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) in Dr Strangelove. He actually had an atomic bomb dropped on Russia.
Air Force General Leon Johnson (1904-97), who grew dahlias when not advocating mass murder, was Le Mayâ€™s parrot. On Thursday, September 12, 1963, Johnson recommended to Kennedy a pre-emptive nuclear strike that would result â€œin at least 140 million casualties in the USSRâ€. Kennedy declined. He was murdered two months later.
Which raises the question, who killed Kennedy? Or, to put it another way, who runs America? In JFK and the Unspeakable (Orbis, 2008), Jim Douglass (b. 1938) nominates a cabal of big business, big banks, big armaments makers, big military, big law, and big media, with the Central Intelligence Agency doing the dirty work.
Douglass cannot easily be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist: he is a theologian and his book was published by an arm of the Catholic Church, the Maryknoll Fathers.
The cabalâ€™s marching song, as Richard Condon did not quite say, appears to be:
Profit is the key to life;
Profit is the clue;
Profit is the drum and fife;
And any war will do.
Kennedy refused to take the CIAâ€™s bait to invade Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961. He said he wanted â€œto splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the windsâ€. As a first step, he sacked CIA boss Allen Dulles (1893-1969).
Douglass says Kennedy had to go because he gravely offended the unspeakable by seeking peace, not war, with Russia, Cuba and Vietnam.
He says Kennedyâ€™s murder on Friday, November 22, 1963 was arranged by Richard Helms (1913-2002, pic), a former journalist who ran the CIAâ€™s Executive Action, a euphemism for removing, by murder or otherwise, leaders of countries which big bidness did not care for.
Douglass demonstrates beyond a peradventure that Lee Harvey Oswald lookalikes were used to falsely implicate Russia, Cuba and Oswald in the murder, and thus give the US an excuse to have a nice war with those countries.
Lyndon Johnson (1908-73, President 1963-69) disappointed the cabal; he did not take the bait to go to war with Russia and Cuba.
On the other hand, he did not want to be clipped. He refused to investigate what he knew was the CIAâ€™s role in the murder, and he organised the cover-up by Allen Dulles and Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891-1974).
And he gave the cabal a great big war in Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson was one of the key players in the JFK assassination along with hard right Texas oil executives such as H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Sr. and perhaps. D.H. Byrd. LBJ had foreknowledge, was a key plotter and was the critical player, besides J. Edgar Hoover, in the cover up of the murder of John Kennedy.

LBJ told his mistress that Texas oil men and the CIA murdered JFK. He only left himself out, conveniently.

Madeleine Duncan Brown was a mistress of Lyndon Johnson for 21 years and had a son with him named Steven Mark Brown in 1950. Madeleine mixed with the Texas elite and had many trysts with Lyndon Johnson over the years, including one at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, TX, on New Year’s Eve 12/31/63.
In the late evening of 12/31/63, just 6 weeks after the JFK assassination, Madeleine asked Lyndon Johnson:
“Lyndon, you know that a lot of people believe you had something to do with President Kennedy’s assassination.”
He shot up out of bed and began pacing and waving his arms screaming like a madman. I was scared!
“That’s bull___, Madeleine Brown!” he yelled. “Don’t tell me you believe that crap!”
“Of course not.” I answered meekly, trying to cool his temper.
“It was Texas oil and those _____ renegade intelligence bastards in Washington.” [said Lyndon Johnson] [Texas in the Morning, p. 189]

[LBJ told this to Madeleine in the late night of 12/31/63 in the Driskill Hotel, Austin, TX in room #254. They spent New Yearâ€™s Eve together here six weeks post JFK assassination. Room #254 was the room that LBJ used to have rendevousâ€™ with his girlfriends â€“ it used to be known as the e “Blue Room” and now it is known as the “Presidential room” and rents for $600-1,000/night as a Presidential suite at the Driskill; located on the Mezzanine Level.]

rosemerry

October 13, 2012 at 5:50 pm

Anyone who would believe the Warren Report probably accepts the official account of “9/11” as well. Warren himself was ashamed of what he was forced to write, and hundreds of those involved in investigating the crime died mysteriously within a few years. Thanks to Jim DiEugenio for this comprehensive summary.

In the category of “What’s New?”, Bill Oâ€™Reilly joins Norman Mailer and Stephen King in the JFK cover up. Other than the money involved,why would these powerful writers waste their time and stain their reputations attempting to redeem the now totally demolished Warren Report? Why? There may be nothing more powerful than popular literature written by block buster authors to influence and solidify public opinion. Tom Hanks is next in line with his motion picture version “Parkland”. It’s just a guess, but I will ruin the surprise ending…Oswald did it.

Philip Zozzaro

October 13, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Great Article, Mr. DiEugenio.

I have read The Assassinations by Lisa Pease and yourself. That book was amazing and comprehensive. I just picked up O’Reilly’s book to glance at while I was at Target and was immediately disappointed. He had previously responded to a question about his book on “The O’Reilly Factor” and he stated that the book would examine the tough questions about the case. This was clearly not the case. The one basic argument I think any one can have in regards to the conspiracy doubters is this: Lee Oswald never confessed. In the 30 plus hours that the cops held him, he never uttered anything but protests of innocence. The work done by yourself, Gaeton Fonzi, James Douglass, Jim Marrs, Jim Garrison and too many authors to name here underlines a conspiracy that has never been brought to justice but continues to be revealed layer by layer. Those in power feel vindicated with every anti-conspiracy book released every so often whether they be: Case Closed, Reclaiming History or Killing Kennedy, when the truth was/has never been that clear.

archivista

October 13, 2012 at 9:12 pm

I’ve read many accounts of Hersh’s so-called “discrediting”, but have read nothing consequential in the discrediting itself.

This article is so close to Jessie Ventura’s conspiracy work that the author might like to explain his aversion to acknowledging it.

Unlike O’Reilly and Dugard, my sources are footnoted in the essay itself.

If I had used Jesse I would have sourced him. I did not. I properly noted who I did use.

The JFK case has nothing to do with liberal vs conservative orientation. There are many people on the right, like Lew Rockwell, who don’t buy the Warren Report.

The JFK case is about facts and evidence and testimony, and how these were manipulated by the Commission and the FBI and CIA. Any why it took decades for the true facts to emerge.

O’Reilly does not acknowledge any of this at all. That is why his book was obsolete the first day it went on sale.

Robert McCabe

October 14, 2012 at 7:49 pm

I agree.

David Nilsson

October 26, 2012 at 9:04 am

Let’s take down this Right v. Left angle once for all. JFK, except in the eyes of nostalgic liberals, was no dove. The claim that he was planning to pull out of SE Asia and leave South Nam to Ho Chi Minh is hooey; had he lived, the military industrial complex would have driven him to escalate as it did LBJ, though domestically Johnson was far more socialistic than Jack Kennedy. Feeling his druthers after the nuclear standoff with Khruschev. Kennedy was eager to proselytize for Our Way of Life with arms if need be, and you can detect the beginnings of the neoliberal Scoop Jackson Democrat strain in his utterances.

Nor is the so-called Right monolithic. The Old Right, such as Justin Raimondo of antiwar. com, and the paleolibertarians such as Lew Rockwell, detest US interventionism and messianism more thoroughly (as a betrayal of American tradition) than any soppy liberal Obama freak who excuses every Big Business war because we gotta get girls into school in Afghanistan or whaddever.

The faultline is not left v. right. That is Lamestream Media deceptin strategy. The real clash is between upholders of neutrality, who think we have enough to fix in our own damn country– as it spends half the world’s ‘defense’ tax money while going bust– and those who want to play Globocop– with special reference to shielding Israel, the country beloved of so many of the chief contributors to the Democratic Party, and these days to the GOP as well. (Zionists have got a corner in party politics).

The old Republicans of the early 1960s, such as the Birchers and Barry Goldwater and those who had supported Taft over Ike, would have loathed the Cold War buildup and anti-commie crusading as much as any fellow traveler of the Left. True conservatives know that ‘War is the Health of the State’ against the free man. They would have urged that a USA that leaves other folks on other continents alone is in less danger of getting its presidents (non-imperial variety) shot, unless it is by disgruntled armaments manufacturers, cheerleaders for foreign wars and such vermin. The dollars we could have saved on bombs and guns could have been spent on energy autonomy and surveillance of the real menace to freedom and democracy in this nation: the malefactors of wealth and power, the ones Gen. Smedley Butler belatedly realised he’d spent his career in the Marines shilling for.

Today’s resurgent Ron and Rand Paul Right, like Adam Smith before him, has no illusions about the virtue and harmlessness of corporate conspirators. True free enterprise and individual liberty depends on defanging the Fortune 500 and the investment banks as much as drone-striking any ‘Islamofascist’, if not more.

Bill Oâ€™Reilly is an Israel-Firster and America’s top Muslim hater. I’m not surprised that he is trying to cover Israeli fingerprints behind the assassinations of JFK and his brother RFK.

In June 1963, JFK wrote the last in a series of insistent letters to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Those letters sought what Israel now demands of Iran: international inspections of its nuclear facilities. The key difference: Kennedy knew for certain that Israel, while portraying itself a friend and ally, repeatedly lied to Kennedy about its nuclear weapons development at the Dimona reactor in the Negev Desert.

The â€œofficialâ€ story said the lone assassin was Oswald, who was later killed by a Zionist Jew Jack Ruby (aka Jacob Leon Rubenstein). Eighteen other material witnesses met mysterious death within three years of JFK assassination.

In August 2012 – Mossad tried to assassinate Gen. Dempsey in Afghanistan.

CLASSIFIED for years and years but when it became public “not a ripple” in the MSM or elsewhere ?

Americans and posters here are either not aware or silenced by a loyalty to Zionism and chose not to mention it.

By June 1963 JFK had finally reached the point of giving Israel an ultimatum on disclosing and dismantling its nuclear weapons programme.

JFK assumed office on January 20, 1961 & only ten days later, Secretary of State Dean Rusk gave the president a secret two-page memo on Israel’s atomic activities, which noted the ‘categoric assurances’ obtained from Ben Gurion ‘that Israel does not have plans for developing atomic weaponry.’

Yes by mid-1963 JFK was well aware that David ben Gurion was pathological liar and terrorist.

JFK’s June 1963 letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, insisted on proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Israel was not developing nuclear weapons at its Dimona reactor facility.

Though his letter was cabled to the U.S. embassy, Ben-Gurion resigned (citing undisclosed personal reasons) before the message could be physically delivered.

JFK tried to stop Israel from starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and the greatest private donors to the development of Israelâ€™s nuclear bomb were private American citizens.(Seymour Hersh)

P-S. Kennedy, five months before his assassination signed off on Executive order #11110, which authorized the US Treasury department to print silver-backed certificates, completely by-passing the private monopoly known as the Federal Reserve.

Yes Israel after the JFK assassination was able to get their Nuclear Bombs and a lot lot more.

The Israelis didn’t control the President’s security in Dallas. Nice try but this is merely a diversion.

Otto Schiff

October 24, 2012 at 1:54 pm

No matter what the subject, Rehmat drags in Israel.
Rehmat is a liar.

Phyllis Bogren

October 13, 2012 at 9:37 pm

I starting reading the book yesterday. Today, after reading the article written by Jim DiEugeio I have decided that I don’t need to finish the book.
I have enough half true statements coming from the media to last a life time.
I am disappointed in O’Reilly. I thought that he was raised better than that.
Don’t tell me Dennis Miller is cut of the same cloth please…………

Robert McCabe

October 14, 2012 at 7:58 pm

I am disappointed as well.My heritage is the same area as O’Reilly’s in Ireland I would like to think he hasn’t forgotten where he came from.

Frances in California

October 15, 2012 at 7:22 pm

I’m of Irish ancestry as well; ‘even have great grandparents sharing the name Reilly . . . but I wouldn’t patronize the pub that lets Bill drink there.

Oona

October 13, 2012 at 9:58 pm

There are a couple people who ought to be “waterboarded” for all the answers regarding JFK’s murder… they are Henry Kissinger and Arlen Spector. (The US military says waterboarding is not torture, so what are we waiting for? Let the military interrogators solve the crime of the century.)

annalisa

October 15, 2012 at 1:11 pm

Ummm, Arlen Specter is dead. I don’t think waterboarding is going to help.

Vince

October 14, 2012 at 2:01 am

O’Reilly says JFK was not alone in the blame for the bay of pigs and that he would not have sent ground troops into Vietnam, though he did increase “advisors” by the thousands. In essence he did increase troops. And JFK did have extramarital affairs so I’m not sure what “right wing mythology” to discredit Kennedy DiEugenio is speaking of.

On pages 51-52, hat authors write that the so -called cancellation of the D-Day air strikes was the main reason for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. And that JFK did this knowing the enterprise would likely now be doomed.

With the two declassified reports on the operation–Taylor Report and Kirkpatrick Report–it has now become evident that the D Day air strike was something that was added to the operation and not originally approved by Kennedy. This is why Cabell asked to see Rusk before launching them in the first place. In my upcoming rewrite of Destiny Betrayed, I spend a whole chapter on this issue. So I understand it well. This whole D Day cancellation was a myth created by Dulles and Hunt to shift the blame for the failure from CIA to Kennedy.

On p. 296, the authors say Vietnam was an inherited headache to LBJ. Johnson inherited a withdrawal plan from Kennedy. In the form of NSAM 263. IT was Johnson who discounted 263 and then reversed it with NSAM 288. The authors then say LBJ “mismanaged the war”. Well, I guess you could say committing 540, 000 combat troops, more bombs than were dropped on Germany, and killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of civilians and tens of thousands of Americans, “mismanagement”. I would call it a colossal disaster myself.

That is not writing history. It is distorting history. And when you add in all the deceptions I noted, that is what makes this such a bad book.

Vince

October 14, 2012 at 11:44 pm

Mr. DiEugenio, I don’t disagree with your overall claim that the book did not offer anything new and insightful into the JFK assassination debate and that it actually noted “facts” that are indeed not true. Yet, I think O’Reilly, while getting some of the facts wrong, didn’t seek to place the blame of BOP solely on JFK. I don’t have the book in front of me so I can’t reference a page number but I am pretty sure he mentioned how the CIA deceived him on the chance of success. I do know that I did not come away from the book with a sense that O’Reilly thought JFK caused it to fail on his own. Also, I am almost positive the book says JFK was not planning a ground war in Vietnam. The claim that Johnson inherited the problem of Vietnam in true but it does not mean he inherited an inevitable ground war. Johnson is to blame for that indeed.
BTW, I am excited for your rewrite of Destiny Betrayed. I have read some of your articles on CTKA.net and you seem one of the more reasonable conspiracy theorists. (I have debates with people on the amazon.com comment sections of Killing Kennedy who believe that just about everyone from Nixon to H.W. Bush was involved.) You believe that the conspiracy was planned by a small group do you not? Anti-Castro Cubans, rogue CIA and some generals. I’ve read JFK and the Unspeakable and know you approve of it but don’t you think the conspiracy Douglass presents is so large that it borders on unrealistic? I find it hard to believe that numerous generals, officials in the CIA and the FBI, politicians, members of JFK’s own administration, and businessmen were all involved in a plot to kill JFK and no one credible ever talked. I believe that the cover-up involved people covering their own asses because of their incompetence before the assassination but to say that everyone who covered it up had a role in killing Kennedy is not something I can believe.
Also, just because the military industrial complex profited from Vietnam,I don’t see how that can be proof of its involvement in JFK’s death. I think by November 1963, JFK was holding his Vietnam policy close to the chest and the possibly of increasing military aid, etc was not totally off the table. He even made sure the withdrawal policy was kept on the down low. I think the claim by some conspiracy theorists that the generals and military industrial complex knew JFK was not going into Vietnam so they killed him is lacking in evidence. JFK’s public claims on Vietnam were actually quite hawkish, it was his private ones that showed he was a practical cold warrior and that he was not going to fall into the same trap as the French. I feel JFK was probably killed for his Cuba policy rather than Vietnam, since no one really knew what JFK was going to do in Southeast Asia except a select few. Even RFK believed sending troops in Vietnam was a good idea at first. Whats your ideas on that? I know you probably discuss a lot of it in your book but I figured I’d ask now and hope for a reply. I also have a few questions on the assassination itself that no conspiracy theorist seems to want to answer. Would you be willing to field a few questions? They aren’t questions attacking conspiracy claims-they are just questions I feel need to be answered in order to get a clearer picture of the assassination.

As per Vietnam, he tires to have it both ways. Early on he says that JFK is planning on withdrawing after he is re-elected. But then he says that LBJ inherited a headache from Kennedy, therefore he tries to blur the breakage in policy by not mentioning NSAM 263 and 288.

There is little doubt, after the declassification of the Sec Def meeting of May 1963 that Kennedy was intent on getting out of Vietnam. That record is a game changer that even convinced the NY TImes that JFK was planning on exiting. Every military advisor to JFK–Bundy, McNamara, and Taylor–is now on record as saying Kennedy was getting out and LBJ changed the policy.

In the rewrite of my book, I do not state that any one issue was the reason for the assassination. I try to present Kennedy as a break with the Cold War consensus that had developed through Truman, Acheson, Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers. How Kennedy opposed this from an early age through his talks with Edmund Gullion in Saigon in 1951. And how his opposition evolved and strengthened by the time he became president. I then show specifically where he broke with the national security state in several places. And how, after his murder, that breakage was restored.

And that restoration under LBJ cost millions of lives.

Vince

October 15, 2012 at 9:33 pm

Do you think that JFK was a complete dove in his foreign policy? I do see how he challenged the traditional order but he was not, in my opinion, a dove. He was a practical cold warrior. He realized that the status quo was not sustainable and that if things were not done to ease tensions, war would inevitably result. Yet, he engaged in numerous traditional cold war policies, such as aggressive rhetoric, albeit mixed with reasons for hope of better relations. He went after Castro with a vengeance and increased the defense budget. His support for third world nationalism was a cold war policy to get those third world countries away from the Soviet banner. He did change the reasons for some policies but he continued many inherited from Eisenhower and Truman. Yes JFK hoped to end tensions with the Soviet Union but he did not want to do that at the expense of looking weak, in the eyes of Americans and Khrushchev. I think his presidency is too complex and his actions so wild-ranging that calling him a hawk or a dove is a simplification.

Vince

October 15, 2012 at 9:34 pm

I meant wide-ranging, not wild-ranging

James DiEugenio

October 16, 2012 at 9:02 pm

Vince:

In my new book I will use fur chapters at the beginning to define who JFK really was. And how his policies have been disguised and twisted. No one has ever done this in a JFK assassination book before. So its about time someone did.

When you say a ‘Complete dove” what does that mean? JFK was Gandhi? No.

But as you will see, his policies were a clear break with what occurred before.

And I will also demonstrate how LBJ then restored the status quo.

Guy Montag

October 14, 2012 at 6:58 am

…….and expect it to get worse with the 50th anniversary fast approaching! I bet a slew of ‘officially backed’ pro lone nut books will be published just in time for November next year? You know, the type to finally put to bed all those absurd conspiracy theories of the past 50 years, etc etc. I wonder if the great Gerald Posner has a reissue/update of Case Closed planned? I also eagerly look forward to seeing what a pile of (insert appropriate word), the new Tom Hanks film is. Did he decide to do this on his own or is somebody paying him to make it?

Guy Montag

October 14, 2012 at 7:00 am

Stephen King also really disappointed me too btw…

Robert McCabe

October 14, 2012 at 8:02 pm

If they don’t take sides with the government they will be put out of business.

Frances in California

October 15, 2012 at 7:20 pm

Really? As I understand it, King writes fiction.

Robert McCabe

October 15, 2012 at 8:10 pm

Hi Frances,what I was trying to say is that all media in my opinion has to support the Warren Commission or they will find themselves without their millstone.Thanks.

Frank

October 14, 2012 at 2:36 pm

I was with Bill O’Reilly when he came to Florida to interview Oswald’s Dallas friend, Georges DeMohrenschildt and had to interview his surviving daughter instead because Georges “committed suicide.” I was O’Reilly’s television cameraman, a local hire.
I spent three days with O’Reilly, and trust me when I say he did not believe Oswald killed Kennedy. He was convinced all evidence indicated otherwise. He wanted to film DeMohrenschildt because DeMohrenschildt was going to blow the whistle on the whole deal in the upcoming HSCOA investigations. O’Reilly was a pit-bull, and was prepared to blow the case wide open before the testimony. And now he thinks Oswald was the lone gunman? Don’t believe it. It wouldn’t sell as many books.

F. G. Sanford

October 14, 2012 at 4:18 pm

You know, I spent three days with John Wilkes Boothe, and if he had gotten a chance to write a book, I’m sure he would also have chosen a plot most likely to sell the most books. He committed suicide, so they burned down the barn he was hiding in to get rid of the evidence…

Come on. If O’Reilly came out with a blockbuster revelation, it would sell a shitload of books. His advantage is that he can huxter coffee mugs, dog sweaters, door mats or any other kind of faux patriotic claptrap junk he wants to, courtesy of his TV show. This book will be no different. It could have a transcription of “Dick and Jane” inside, and nobody would complain, because his audience is functionally illiterate. But, you are right about one thing: a guy like DeMohrenschildt, who actually was a confidant of George H. W. Bush AND the Bouvier family, does not strike up a friendship with a guy like Oswald merely based on a mutual interest in stamp collecting. THAT whole story stinks to high heaven.

annalisa

October 15, 2012 at 1:13 pm

Ummm O’Reilly donates all of the money made from the “faux patriotic claptrap” to charity.

Robert McCabe

October 15, 2012 at 8:11 pm

Who cares?

charles caruso

October 14, 2012 at 3:54 pm

And check out Cabell mayor Dallas that day, a brother of three top CIA honchoes fired after Bay of Pigs.
Even a story he altered route of limo at last minute.

This is a brilliant essay written by a retired attorney living in
Beverly Hills California and is worth the 10 minutes it will take to read. Mikie has spent years on researching the Coup D’etat and his summation is right on. Here is the essay with a final version due November 22, 2012.

Q&A ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY: An Attorney’s Evidentiary & Historical Analysis.

by Michael Schweitzer on Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:35am Â·
.

by Michael B. Schweitzer

Attorney at Law (retired)

Introductory note: This essay is a work-in-progress. I will post the final draft on Thanksgiving â€“ November 22nd.

WHO ASSASSINATED PRESIDENT KENNEDY?

THE TRUTH: The CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy, in what is nowadays called a “regime change.” Former CIA director Allen Dulles ordered the assassination, and assigned the two most qualified department heads to plan and direct it: Deputy Director for Plans (assassinations) Richard M. Helms and Deputy Director for Counterintelligence (covert military operations) James J. Angleton. Dulles, a criminal mastermind, had lost his title when Kennedy fired him two years earlier for launching covert military operations to force him into wars. But Dulles retained control of the secret inner circle he installed, and it included his chosen specialists. The JFK assassination was a Helms-Angleton operation, code-named “The Big Event,” according to the deathbed confession of one of Dulles’ personal assistants in 1961, E. Howard Hunt. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a ruthless political manipulator with a mania to be president and a wildly manic-depressive serial killer with a personal assassin (Malcolm Wallace), participated in the conspiracy but his active role came later: to control the cover-up after the assassination made him president. Johnson had positioned himself as Kennedy’s successor in 1960 by blackmailing Kennedy into nominating him for the vice presidency with evidence of Kennedy’s womanizing furnished by Johnson’s close friend and neighbor, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, so he may well have intended to kill Kennedy himself. But greater powers intervened and preempted whatever LBJ may have had in mind. Johnson may also have helped secure the financing from his Texas oil backers H.L. Hunt, John Mecom and especially Clint Murchison (pronounced “Murkison”) â€“ enraged at Kennedy for proposing to eliminate a massive tax break for oilmen â€“ although Dulles had stronger ties to oilmen than Johnson, having long protected their interests as an attorney then as CIA director. The killing itself was carried out by the United States Secret Service (previously thwarted in Chicago and Tampa) and long-time CIA Mafia contract shooters. The operation ambushed the president in a Dallas motorcade by maneuvering his open limousine into a killing zone where four of thirteen bullets struck him from front and rear. Johnson then squelched the real threat to the cover-up â€“ independent investigations, particularly by Texas authorities with legal jurisdiction and congressional committees with constitutional jurisdiction â€“ by creating a seven-man committee of inquiry with seemingly unimpeachable credentials: the Warren Commission. The members included Dulles, who took control and was in fact the only active member of the group. The Commission’s Report mimicked the falsified FBI report Hoover provided it and pinned the blame a “lone nut” assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald had worked for the FBI as a contract agent and was deceptively embraced as an asset, but loathed, by the CIA, which chose him as the patsy in Dallas. Oswald himself was shot dead two days after Kennedy in an event staged for live television by the CIA so all Americans could see for themselves “case closed.”

JUST THE FACTS: As an attorney with 30 years’ experience researching law and evaluating evidence, I reject speculation. I report my findings and, when necessary (as in a case like this), my deductions with the highest probability of necessarily following from my findings. For 2Â½ years now, starting in 2009, I have devoted more than 4,000 hours to researching the assassination of President Kennedy. I have read all of what I deem the most credible and scholarly books and articles on the subject; studied the most significant available “primary source” materials (statements and images from the time, preserved in various media); reviewed thousands of documents, including volumes of recently declassified CIA internal memoranda, the transcripts of the Warren Commission hearings, much of the 40-volume Senate “Church Committee” report on the CIA (completed in 1976 after two years of investigation) that unmasked astonishingly un-American activities, and a long-withheld 600-page Justice Department report on CIA-Nazi collaboration entitled “Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” finally coerced into release in 2010 by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit (National Security Archive v. Dept. of Justice); and went back decades in time, tracing the life histories of the key individuals. Then I organized this collection of disparate fragments in a fairly unique way â€“ not as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, which is two-dimensional, but as connected dots, in a shape that more resembles a three-dimensional isotope, revealing linkages not otherwise visible by altering the angle of view. From this research and organizational method, I wrote this essay (which, for sake of brevity, does not include footnotes, but every factual statement is sourced). Anyone can do the same, because all of the information is in the public domain â€“ but, as President Kennedy said he wanted to do to the CIA, splintered in a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. I do not pretend, to paraphrase that famous triple-redundancy they say in court, to have found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But I am confident I have drawn together sufficient evidence to offer this essay for your consideration. For me, the surprise that emerges is not the assassination. The surprise would be if there wasn’t one. Turning to specific questions:

WHY WAS PRESIDENT KENNEDY ASSASSINATED? Mainly because Kennedy was about to end the Cold War, an extraordinarily profitable enterprise for the military-industrial complex. (There were additional reasons, but this was the main one.) The Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, transformed both Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy became an outspoken peace advocate and called for nuclear disarmament. Khrushchev responded by secretly entering into in peace negotiations. Kennedy had become our first and last anti-Establishment president. He threatened to gut the profits of American’s most towering industrial and financial interests. Both leaders had to go, and Dulles knew better than anyone outside the Kremlin that killing Kennedy would topple Khrushchev as well, because replacing Kennedy with hardliner Johnson would compel the Soviets to counter-move by installing their own hardliner, Leonid Brezhnev, which they did eleven months after the assassination. The Cold War, about to end in Kennedy’s second term, continued for another profitable quarter of a century. And one must admit Dulles was clever. He overthrew the two most powerful governments on earth by killing just one man.

EFFECT ON THE WAR IN VIETNAM: Johnson’s first major act as President was to issue National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273 on November 26, 1963. It reversed Kennedy’s NSAM 263, issued on October 11, 1963, that ordered all American military personnel withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1965. Just four days after the assassination, the first concrete policy reversal emerged to enrich war profiteers. Interestingly, McGeorge Bundy, the highest-ranking CIA infiltrator in the Kennedy Administration (the national security adviser), drafted NSAM 273 for Johnson the day BEFORE the assassination.

KENNEDY PREDICTED THE CIA WOULD LEAD A COUP: Fifty days before the assassination, famed New York Times columnist Arthur Krock published an article quoting a “very high American official” as stating: “If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government it will come from the CIA.” It later became known the “official” was President Kennedy, who spoke the words to him one day earlier. Kennedy often turned to his friend Krock to publish statements too politically explosive for him to speak as President.

HOW DID DULLES GAIN SUCH POWER? President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him as the first civilian CIA Director in March, 1953, shortly after taking office, on the advice of Ike’s friend and confidant Prescott Bush. Bush, during WWII, had been one of Hitler’s American bankers until the FBI seized his bank, and both his son and grandson became U.S. presidents. Dulles, a mysterious man with a documented Nazi past, in effect infiltrated the CIA as its first Nazi director. President Harry S Truman had created the CIA as the intelligence arm of the Executive Branch by signing the National Security Act of 1947. The Act created the CIA in a simple 6-word sentence: “There is a Central Intelligence Agency.” And it gave the CIA precisely one power: to “collect intelligence . . . outside the United States.” Dulles, on his own authority and in direct violation of the law he intimately knew because he co-authored it, gave the CIA a second power: to conduct covert military operations, a function that entitled it to full use of legitimate armed forces resources off the books under a section of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 â€“ if he lied about his purpose. He invoked the 1949 Act so often, his covert operations consumed more than 80% of the Agency’s budget. Although the 1949 Act shielded the CIA from almost any accountability, Dulles protected himself further by re-structuring the Agency horizontally from vertically, so no compartment would know what any other was doing. And he used his new creation not to serve his country, but as the enforcement arm of the military-industrial complex. Dulles’ CIA enriched the most powerful private interests in America: industrialists, bankers, big oil, agribusiness, the Rockefellers, and even himself. Dulles had learned to profit from an intelligence post during World War II, when he ran a European office of the OSS (wartime predecessor of the CIA) while acting as intermediary for Hitler’s bankers. His covert operations included two “regime changes” that turned democracies into dictatorships. In Iran in 1953, he overthrew the Mossadegh government (Operation TP-AJAX) after it nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) that controlled Iran’s oil industry. After the coup, AIOC became British Petroleum and partnered with U.S. corporations for equal control of Iranian oil. Then in Guatemala in 1954, he overthrew the Arbenz government (Operation PBSUCCESS) after it initiated a land-reform program that re-distributed the country’s arable land to landless peasants. The U.S. government (most vocally Vice President Richard Nixon) justified the coup by branding Arbenz a Soviet puppet, notwithstanding his U.N. voting record was nearly identical to that of the U.S. The coup’s real purpose was to recapture the 80% of Guatemala’s arable land owned by United Fruit Company (later United Brands). Dulles had been a lawyer for United Fruit and held a personal stake in the outcome (with his Secretary-of-State brother John Foster Dulles) because he remained a major stockholder. In his Guatemala invasion, Dulles killed 150,000 people.

THE DULLES TOUCH: Dulles, as CIA chief, specialized in 4 things: assassinating people, overthrowing governments, infiltrating and manipulating the news media (Operation Mockingbird), and conducting sadistic mind-control experiments on unknowing subjects (Project MK-ULTRA). Dulles created MK-ULTRA in his first order as CIA director, on April 13,1953, and gave it 6% of the total CIA budget without any oversight. “MK” stood for “mind control” (as spelled in German, “kontrolle”) and “ULTRA” was a top secret CIA designation so high it withheld information from the president. Dulles himself called the process what it actually was: “brainwashing” (as he did in the subject line of a cover memo to J. Edgar Hoover dated April 25, 1956). To staff his project, Dulles smuggled dozens of Nazi chemical and physical torture specialists into secret CIA bases in the U.S. to continue the work they had done for Hitler â€“ a direct violation of President Truman’s ban against using Nazi war criminals when he approved “Operation Paperclip” in September, 1946 to import German scientists. Horrifically, among Dulles’ imports, under the code name “Dr. Green,” was literally the cruelest man on earth, Auschwitz’ “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele. Among many contributions to the project, according to a recently declassified CIA internal memorandum, Mengele disemboweled children in front of other children to desensitize them. In 1973, then-CIA Director Richard Helms, tipped off about forthcoming investigations, ordered all MK-ULTRA project files destroyed. But being an assassin, not a bureaucrat, he forgot the Agency kept accounting as well as project files, and in 1977, under a Freedom of Information Act request, 16,000 pages of overlooked MK-ULTRA financial records surfaced. Dulles also planted infiltrators throughout the federal government, including every branch of the military, every investigative and other significant agency, and the White House. And he nurtured close ties with Mafia leaders, so he could (and did) engage their contract killers to do the Agency’s dirty work, to maintain its “plausible deniability” (a term he coined). Indeed, another recently declassified CIA internal memo reveals Dulles personally approved a murder contract with Johnny Roselli, second-in-command of the Chicago Mob under Sam Giancana. For a CIA like that, killing Kennedy would be a day at the office.

WHO TOLD THE TRUTH? Ironically, the only players who told the truth were the two supposed “killers”: Oswald and Jack Ruby, the man who “shot” him in the stomach during his basement-garage transfer from Dallas city to county jail! In city jail corridors, Oswald told reporters, “I didn’t shoot anybody” and “I’m just a patsy.” And in a corridor two years later, Ruby told reporters, “About Adlai Stevenson, if he was vice president, there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy.” Asked “Would you explain again?” he replied, “Well, the answer is the man in office now.”

THE RUBY-OSWALD CASE-CLOSER: Ruby fired a blank. Oswald, who had asked to wear a dark sweater before the transfer to conceal the lack of blood on black-and-white TV, groaned twice and dropped to the ground in an Oscar-worthy performance. The CIA then double-crossed him in the ambulance and shot him for real. The necessity: The coup required 2 assassinations: JFK and Oswald. Letting Oswald live would have kept questions alive for years â€“ during the prolonged process of trial and appeal â€“ which would not only have delayed legitimizing the Johnson presidency, but given the public time to think about what happened and a jury a chance to acquit. That door had to be shut at once â€“ and it was, within 48 hours. Planners selected Ruby so the second killing, like the first, could be pinned on a “lone nut” gunman. But the scenario required a single shot to play out plausibly. Ruby had to lunge at Oswald through a throng of police, reporters and photographers â€“ a multiplicity of variables to hinder him. A fatal shot could only be guaranteed if someone else fired it. Absent this precaution, there may well have been a second “magic bullet” to explain: how a single shot by Ruby caused two wounds to Oswald. The evidence that Ruby did not shoot Oswald: photographer Bob Jackson, who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the “shooting,” said there was “not a speck of blood anywhere” on the body or at the crime scene; the two “stretcher photos” of Oswald being carried to the ambulance show not only no blood on his sweater, but no damage to a single fiber; and a shot by Ruby would have passed straight through him, but the trajectory of the bullet that killed him was upward. And Ruby, recounting the “incident” (his words) in an interview three weeks before he died, said: “I can’t recall what had happened from the time I came to the bottom of the ramp until the police officers had me on the ground.” His mind was blank about everything he said and did during his encounter with Oswald, as if programmed by MK-ULTRA to auto-erase. To those who doubt the proposition the Ruby-Oswald “shooting” was staged, consider this: in a plot that required two assassinations, what is the probability the first occurred by conspiracy and the second by chance?

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #1: The Warren Commission itself concluded Oswald could have fired only three shots. But their own evidence proved at least five. The Commission claimed a first shot missed and injured bystander James Tague with a flying curb fragment; a second (the “magic bullet”) entered the rear of Kennedy’s neck, exited his throat, entered Connally’s back, shattered a rib, exited Connally’s chest, shattered his right wrist, then penetrated his left thigh (causing a total of seven wounds); and a third hit Kennedy in the head. But Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in the front passenger seat, testified he heard Kennedy cry out, “My God, I’m hit!” (Warren Hearing Transcripts, Vol. II, p. 73.) Kennedy could only have said this BEFORE the throat-shot, because it took out his vocal chords. Necessarily a separate, previous bullet struck him â€“ and not in the rear neck as the Warren Commission falsely claimed, but in the back six inches below the shoulders, as a Parkland Hospital photograph shows. Moreover, all of the 40-or-so eye-witnesses (civilian and governmental) to the head-shot swore they heard two shots, half-a-second apart â€“ necessarily raising the bullet count to five. Incidentally, the last shot was an exploding projectile fired from the front that blew the president’s brains so far beyond the trunk of the car they splattered people behind it, and the famous Zapruder film shows First Lady Jacqueline stretch her arm to the far end of the trunk to retrieve a piece. (Curiously, the news media has consistently and falsely reported she climbed onto the trunk, as if she were a coward trying to escape. The Zapruder film clearly shows she never left the back seat, but planted her knees atop it, grabbed the brain tissue, and immediately sat down again.) There is only one impossibility in the murder of President Kennedy: a lone assassin.

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #2: Six of the ten members of Kennedy’s Cabinet were sent out of the country before the assassination, on a flight to Japan that only one of them had to make, Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Flying with them, for no reason, was Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger â€“ an expert on motorcade security. Only two important Cabinet members were in Washington, D.C. when Lyndon Johnson became the President of the United States: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Attorney General, Kennedy’s brother Robert. Everyone else with authority to run a Department of the federal government was stranded over the Pacific Ocean in a presidential aircraft â€“ with the code book to communicate with the White House missing! They learned about the assassination from an old-fashioned telex â€“ and with no code book, only Johnson could run their Departments. Meanwhile, McNamara, attending a budget meeting at the Pentagon, was never told by anyone there that Kennedy died. He only learned about it 90 minutes later, when he received a personal phone call from Robert Kennedy. Someone cleared a path for Johnson to run almost the entire federal government himself, without any impediment, for the first 24 hours after the assassination. And also absent from the country during the assassination was the Joint Chief of Staff’s intermediary with the CIA, Col. Fletcher Prouty. Someone sent Prouty on a pointless mission to the South Pole!

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #3: Only the CIA had the capability to carry out the assassination the way it happened. Its leaders included brilliant coup planners Helms and Angleton (Johnson later appointed Helms CIA director). It had infiltrators in the Secret Service, up to the second-in-command of the White House Detail, Floyd M. Boring (under Chief Gerald A. Behn), who designed a motorcade route that forced the presidential limo to crawl at 11 miles-per-hour through a 120-degree turn (virtually a U-turn) into a plaza open to gunfire from all directions â€“ impermissibly placed first in line â€“ to enter a freeway it had no need to use; abandoned all presidential security in Dallas, where local agent-in-charge Emory P. Roberts even ordered JFK’s bodyguards off the back bumper of his limo; and later secretly shipped the limo to Ford Motors in Detroit, where Lee Iacocca rebuilt it to destroy all evidence of bullet hits, including constructing a new windshield with a scratch where a bullet hole â€“ perfectly positioned to hit Kennedy in the head â€“ had been. It had long-standing relationships with Mafia leaders and engaged some of their finest contract killers to shoot the president. It had the ability literally to turn participants’ minds on and off thanks to Project MK-ULTRA. It had major influence over the U.S. media thanks to Operation Mockingbird, which easily enabled it to stage the Oswald-Ruby case-closer for live television (heavily promoted for public viewing by Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry). And it has repeatedly used the same modus operandi in assassinating not only John F. Kennedy, but Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon: misdirecting blame onto a “lone nut gunman” acting under its own control (willingly or unwillingly). The entire sequence of events displays the distinctive and brilliant hallmarks of Allen Dulles, as identifiable as an artist’s brushstrokes on a painting.

AND A FINAL TWIST: Rep. Hale Boggs, the member of the Warren Commission most dissatisfied with its findings, died in a mysterious airplane crash in Alaska on Oct. 16,1972. He had blasted the FBI on the House floor the previous year â€“ on April 5, 1971 â€“ for using Gestapo tactics against opponents of federal policy. Boggs was taken to the airport for the first leg of the trip by a young Democrat who later, as president, appointed Boggs’ wife, Lindy, as the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican after she served 18 years in Congress after her husband disappeared. The young Democrat: Bill Clinton.

CAVEAT: THIS ESSAY ADDRESSES ONLY THE OPERATION, NOT ITS MASTERMIND

This essay only addresses what may be characterized as the “second level” question: Who assassinated President Kennedy? This is a planning and operational question, and the evidence seems to support a clear conclusion: the CIA, at the highest level, on orders of Allen Dulles.

Not included here is the “first level” question: Who above the operational level initiated the assassination? Who was the mastermind who tapped Dulles on the shoulder and said “Kill the President”? This over-arching question is more difficult to answer because no tangible evidence exists. But the answer can still be ascertained, at least to a high degree of confidence, by using a different methodology: deduction.

Different authors and researchers have deduced different masterminds. I perceive three main schools of thought, which I will present first. Then I will state my own deduction. However, I will cabin it as a “preliminary deduction,” because I base it on research that, although considerable, is still ongoing.

â€¢ THE MAIN THEORIES IDENTIFYING THE “MASTERMIND” OF THE ASSASSINATION

1â€”LYNDON JOHNSON: Many people, including Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy, believed it was Lyndon Johnson, who coveted the presidency and blackmailed JFK into making him next in line. Author Phillip F. Nelson espouses this belief in his scholarly but regrettably prurience-tainted book, “LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination” (2011 revised edition).

FOOTNOTE TO CAVEAT â€“ OTHER LBJ PROJECTS: Covering up the JFK assassination was only one of Lyndon Johnson’s dirty projects as president. He was also the only president who forced a Supreme Court Justice to resign: Kennedy appointee Arthur Goldberg. Goldberg had worked in U.S. intelligence during WWII and spied for President Franklin Roosevelt on wiretaps (installed by British agents in New York) of Allen Dulles that monitored his Nazi activities. The cover story for Justice Goldberg’s resignation was that Johnson urged him to replace the late Adlai Stevenson as Ambassador to the United Nations. Disclosed by an apparent late-1970s Church Committee leak and reported for a day by a few alternative media outlets then never repeated is the way Stevenson died. During a brief stop in London on July 14, 1965, he suddenly fell to the ground dead on the steps of the U.S. Embassy, shot in the neck by a CIA ice dart. LBJ had ordered the first combat troops into Vietnam just three months earlier, on March 8, 1965 â€“ an escalation Stevenson (like JFK) opposed. So down at the same time went a key Johnson and a key Dulles irritant.

2â€”THE CIA: Others believe the CIA itself initiated the assassination at a very high level because Kennedy was determined to reform it, stripping it of all but its intelligence-gathering functions. As long-time researcher Mark Lane posits in his “Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK” (2011), “in an act that the CIA likely considered self-defense, the agency . . . assassinated President Kennedy before he could take action against it.” Lane specifically fingers Richard Helms as the mastermind, and also explains how the CIA made Oswald a “patsy”: Oswald’s friend “CIA operative George De Mohrenschildt . . . found a job for Oswald at the book depository located directly on the route selected for the presidential motorcade.”

3â€”HIGHER POWERS THAN THE CIA OR LBJ: Author/theologian James W. Douglass, in his highly regarded “JFK and the Unspeakable” (2008), blames neither the CIA nor LBJ, but powers higher than the government, yet he characterizes them only as “the Unspeakable.” Douglass acknowledges possible CIA involvement, but posits at most “CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms and Counter-intelligence head James Angleton knew [about the assassination] beforehand.”

I consider Lyndon Johnson an unlikely candidate for “mastermind.” LBJ was a masterfully cut-throat operator. He certainly played an active part in the conspiracy by controlling the cover-up. But I do not find credible his having control over the power centers in the government whose willing involvement the plot required. Nor do I find credible the CIA deploying its vast resources to assassinate the President of the United States to serve Lyndon Johnson’s personal ambitions.

I also dismiss the thesis the conspiracy originated within the CIA. The CIA served the global geopolitical and profit interests of the most towering industrial and financial enterprises in the nation. Self-indulgence like killing an American president out of personal spite would have contradicted the very reason for its existence. Allen Dulles had molded the CIA to enforce the will of those private enterprises, who were his clients â€“ and remained so after he was sacked. Their power exceeded Dulles’ (just as Dulles’ exceeded the president’s), and Kennedy had initiated policies that imminently threatened their livelihoods. I believe Dulles gave the “green light” to his loyal top-echelon insiders to kill the president. But he was not the mastermind, either.

I concur with Douglass that higher powers set the machinery in motion. Indeed, I consider Douglass’ insight a major breakthrough in understanding the magnitude of the conspiracy. But where Douglass stops, I continue. His “unspeakable” powers are not amorphous or impenetrable. They are people who have names, and their names can be identified by deduction. Like puppeteers pulling strings, their positions can be determined by observing the movements that result when they pull the strings.

Among the higher powers, I perceive three distinct candidates â€“ each a highest-tier power in politics and finance with a Nazi past and an especially intimate relationship with Dulles:

(1) Averell Harriman, who ordered the November 2, 1963 assassination of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem behind Kennedy’s back while Kennedy was vacationing in Hyannisport;

(2) John J. McCloy, who controlled so many private and public institutions journalist Richard Rovere dubbed him “Chairman of the American Establishment”; and

(3) David S. Rockefeller, Sr. â€“ but at the urging of someone else. Rockefeller was the godfather of the only trillionaire family in America and its massive global oil, industrial, chemical, agribusiness and banking empire.

My personal choice is Rockefeller, for three reasons. ONE: No one suffered more at Kennedyâ€™s hands than Rockefeller. Starting in mid-1963, Kennedy hit him directly in the pocketbook, not once but three times. On June 4, 1963, JFK issued Executive Order 11110, which stripped the privately-owned Federal Reserve Bank of its monopoly under the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to create the nationâ€™s currency and loan it to the government at interest, and restored that constitutional power (Article I, Section 8, clause 5) to the Treasury Department. The Rockefeller, whose Chase Manhattan Bank was the Fedâ€™s second largest shareholder after the Bank of England, was burned worse than any other American. On June 10, 1963, JFK delivered his famous â€œpeace speech,â€ a commencement address at American University in which he called for not only nuclear but total disarmament. Soviet Premier Khrushchev called it the best speech by an American president since Franklin Roosevelt and the next month negotiated the Atmospheric Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first step in dismantling the military-industrial complex, another major source of Rockefeller income. And on October 11, 1963, JFK issued his total Vietnam withdrawal order, NSAM 263, blockading the biggest prize of the war: vast oil fields off the south coast of Vietnam coveted by Rockefellerâ€™s Shell Oil Company. TWO: The Rockefeller-Dulles relationship was exceptionally close. Dullesâ€™ first OSS headquarters was in the Rockefeller Center, and he had Rockefeller regularly briefed on CIA activities. And THREE: Rockefeller had a private advisor whose word was taken so seriously, once given it was followed.

Rockefeller’s advisor was Harvard’s star professor of geopolitical aggression Henry Kissinger â€“ an unexcelled master of multi-level strategic gamesmanship and slaughter. (Kissinger was later President Nixon’s national security advisor and a fantastically ruthless man with his own dark history of evil and corruption.) If Rockefeller made a request of his old friend Allen Dulles to kill the president, he would have acted not only on the advice but at the urging of Kissinger. Kissinger, more than any other player in the era of JFK’s peace initiatives, would have fathomed the criticality of removing Kennedy at once. One can almost hear Kissinger’s voice, in its grave Germanic accent, speaking the words, “Kennedy has to go.” If this scenario is correct â€“ and none seem more realistic â€“ then David Rockefeller, Sr. was the man who tapped Dulles on the shoulder and set the machinery of the assassination in motion. But Rockefeller’s action was initiated by the man behind the veil behind the curtain â€“ the true mastermind of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy â€“ Henry Kissinger.
Stephen Courts

Robert McCabe

October 14, 2012 at 9:08 pm

Interesting essay.The Shah of Iran was sick and needed help in American hospitals.Our country denied him access when David Rockefeller got him in right away.The Soviet Union had one of our high tech planes and would not return it to us when Harriman got it released right away.I do believe they represent the Power Elite as Churchill called them.I don’t by Kissinger although I see him as a horrible person.

â€œThe Role of deep-cover CIA officer, Trenton Parker, has been described in earlier pages, and his function in the CIA’s counter-intelligence unit, Pegasus. Parker had stated to me earlier that a CIA faction was responsible for the murder of JFK â€¦ During an August 21, 1993, conversation, in response to my questions, Parker said that his Pegasus group had tape recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy. I asked him, “What group were these tapes identifying?” Parker replied: “Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, Johnson of Texas, George Bush, and J. Edgar Hoover.” I asked, “What was the nature of the conversation on these tapes?”

I don’t have the tapes now, because all the tape recordings were turned over to [Congressman] Larry McDonald. But I listened to the tape recordings and there were conversations between Rockefeller, [J. Edgar] Hoover, where [Nelson] Rockefeller asks, “Are we going to have any problems?” And he said, “No, we aren’t going to have any problems. I checked with Dulles. If they do their job we’ll do our job.” There are a whole bunch of tapes, because Hoover didn’t realize that his phone has been tapped. Defrauding America, Rodney Stich, 3rd edition p. 638-639]

elmerfudzie

October 22, 2012 at 12:20 pm

This is very fine stuff, or I should say, facts. I agree with your Rockefeller arguments. May I suggest the Book by R.J. Groden and H.E. Livingston, Title: High Treason- to your readers. It a good synopsis and has many reference footnotes.

J. Veach

October 14, 2012 at 5:49 pm

I was 14 and in my Freshman Algebra class the day Kennedy was shot and I remember it very clearly! I’ve also studied the assassination extensively and have wondered who (I want names) are the people today that are behind the perpetuaton of this myth that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in firing only 3 shots in 6 seconds that killed the President and so severely wounded Governor Connally? Who are they still protecting after 49 years? The ballistic evidence of the impact of all the bullets is enough to prove there was more than one shooter; i.e. there was also a bullet hole in the limousine’s windshield and another bullet dented the upper windshield molding! After the assassination, the limousine was taken back to the factory where the windshield and molding were both replaced. These facts were also omitted in the Warren Commission Report to make sure the damage never occured. Mr. Teague was a bystander under the triple underpass and was struck on his cheek by a piece of pavement from the impact of another bullet. There were so many guns aimed at the limousine, it’s amazing that Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Connally weren’t also hit by bullets! As evidenced by your review of their book, apparently someone influenced Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Dugard to make sure they supported the “official version” of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy! It is obvious they have no desire to learn the truth! I also have a lot of respect for Robert J. Groden’s extensive work in exposing the truth of what happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963! In the final analysis, one thing remains, there is no Statute Of Limitations on murder!

In my view, the problem with the JFK case has always been the refusal of the mainstream press to countenance any serious objection or alternative to the Warren Report. If the media actually carried the best critiques of the report, then the idea that Oswald killed Kennedy with this cheap Italian rifle, from the sixth floor–which he was not on at the time–hitting 2 of 3 direct hits, which the Commission knew was not possible, would evaporate.

O’Reilly and Dugard are trying to somehow make this thing acceptable again. Even though they must know its a pile of BS. This is why I think Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News is the culprit here.

I would love to debate either man when my book comes out. That would be some real fireworks. It won’t happen though. Ailes it too smart for that. Bill and/or Dugard would look foolish.

J. Veach

October 14, 2012 at 6:48 pm

Mr. DiEugenio:

Thank you for your reply! I saw today on Yahoo that Arlen Specter died today at 82. I wish he had told the truth about the “magic bullet!” I’m sorry for his family that he’s gone and am still hoping that the truth will someday come out!

Google “Arlen Specter and the Single Bullet Theory by Mark Tracy.” What is most egregious about Arlen Specter, besides his entire life of unprincipled political opportunism, is his criminal intimidation of Jean Hill in 1964. Jean Hill from 11/22/63 said that she heard 4-6 shots; she was very close to JFK, and this was strong evidence of a conspiracy. (shooting time perhaps 8 seconds).

In Dallas Texas on November 22, 1963, two women, Jean Hill and Mary Moorman were standing on the south side of Elm Street in Dealey Plaza as Kennedy’s motorcade passed. They were two of the closest eyewitnesses to President Kennedy when he was struck with the fatal head shot. Jean Hill would later be interviewed by Warren Commission attorney Arlen Specter. She recounts her experience with journalist Jim Marrs:
“The FBI took me to Parkland Hospital. I had no idea what I was doing there. They escorted me through a labyrinth of corridors and up to one of the top floors of Parkland. I didn’t know where we were. They took me into this little room where I met Arlen Specter. He talked to me for a few minutes, trying to act real friendly, then this woman, a stenographer, came in and sat behind me. He had told me that this interview would be confidential, then I looked around and this woman was taking notes. I reminded him that the discussion was to be private and he told the woman to put down her notebook, which she did. But when I looked around again she was writing. I got mad and told Specter, ‘You lied to me. I want this over.’ He asked me why I wouldn’t come to Washington, and I said, ‘Because I want to stay alive.’ He asked why I would think that I was in danger and I replied, ‘Well, if they can kill the President, they can certainly get me!’ He replied that they already had the man that did it and I told him, ‘No, you don’t!’

He kept trying to get me to change my story, particularly regarding the number of shots. He said I had been told how many shots there were and I figured he was talking about what the Secret Service told me right after the assassination. His inflection and attitude was that I knew what I was supposed to be saying, why wouldn’t I just say it. I asked him, ‘Look, do you want the truth or just what you want me to say?’ He said he wanted the truth, so I said, ‘The truth is that I heard between four and six shots.’ I told him, ‘I’m not going to lie for you.’ So he starts talking off the record. He told me about my life, my family, and even mentioned that my marriage was in trouble. I said, ‘What’s the point of interviewing me if you already know everything about me?’ He got angrier and finally told me, ‘Look, we can even make you look as crazy as Marguerite Oswald [Lee Oswald’s mother] and everybody knows how crazy she is. We could have you put in a mental institution if you don’t cooperate with us.’ I knew he was trying to intimidate me….

He finally gave me his word that the interview would not be published unless I approved what was written. But they never gave me the chance to read it or approve it. When I finally read my testimony as published by the Warren Commission, I knew it was a fabrication from the first line. After that ordeal at Parkland Hospital, they wrote that my deposition was taken at the U.S. attorney’s office in the Post Office Building.”

Jim Glover

October 15, 2012 at 7:20 pm

Hi James,

My friend, Phil Ochs, who was the first person to tell me about the plot to kill Kennedy before it happened in 63 was working for Kissinger through an air force general in 74, two years before Phil hung himself.
Before the JFK coup he told me he was going to the Fair play for Cuba Committee to find out more.

I called VJ Lee years ago to ask him and he said, â€œYes, Phil was working with usâ€.

Although Phil did not want his fans to know about his secret life he provided me with many Clues about the plot and may be why I found out so much and was positioned to be in Texas on that day and forced to witness key events during and after.

Now it is known that The FPCC was ordered to be infiltrated by Allen Dulles who I knew as a kid but he was pretending to be a Communist known to my Dad as Jack Leblanc but his club foot and smoking pipe gave him away to me.

There is a mountain of evidence pointing to conspiracy, but there is one piece that should have blown the case wide open – the Oswald imposter. Even J Edgar Hoover himself was aware that there was an Oswald imposter in play as far back as when he was still in the USSR. Then there was the infamous phone call where he told LBJ in so many words that the guy in the custody of the Dallas PD was not the same guy on the Mexico City tapes. The Warren Copmmission was aware of these impersonation events. They started popping up with increasing frequency as Nov 22 drew near. The WC would no sooner squash one report of an imposter when up would pop another. You have to hand it to them though, they did a remarkable job of discounting each and every one. And of course the authors of this book never mentioned any of them.

“Killing O’Reilly” …………… has a ring to it, huh? Oh, I mean……… three bangs.

Jim Freeley

October 15, 2012 at 11:53 am

Interesting discussion. O,Reilly is a gasbag and everything he says has to be assumed inaccurate until proven otherwise. What I have never seen really well analyzed is the possible (probable) participation of Soviet hardliners in their intelligence services. It has never been explained to my satisfaction how and why a recent American veteran was allowed into the Soviet Union, how he wound up marrying and being able to bring his wife back to the United States. I cannot believe that he was not under constant scrutiny. This was after all during the Cold War which was possibly the most paranoid era in American history. For Oswald to have been able to transport a weapon to the area where Kennedy was without being observed is totally unbelievable. Just as many in this discussion have raised the possible involvement of various elements of the US power structure, we should not forget that much of the Soviet power structure felt humiliated by the Cuban missile crisis. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there was collusion by these otherwise hostile groups. I have no answers to the overall question of who shot Kennedy and why, but I have always been convinced that the real shooter was not Oswald, and that there was more of a motive than an unsatisfactory discharge from the USMC

Vince

October 15, 2012 at 9:48 pm

haha I don’t think O’Reilly is that bad but I do feel that he took the easy way out in this book. I too question the role of communists in the assassination. A lot of evidence put out by conspiracy theorists proves a cover-up after the fact but evidence proving that the CIA/Military was involved in a plot to actually kill JFK is lacking. Oswald, if he was involved with anti-communists, could have been an infiltrator. His actions after his arrest lead me to believe he was a communist. Why would any CIA agent pretend to be a communist after being arrested for the murder of the president? Wouldn’t he say “hey you guys got the wrong guy. I’m working for the agency.” Nothing he did while is custody points to anti-communist leanings. I don’t think anyone would continue a show of pretending to be a communist if he really was not, especially when questioned by the FBI. I think if he was involved with anti-communists in New Orleans, he was trying to infiltrate them. But I do not rule out the possibility that anti-communists framed him. But all evidence points to the conclusion Oswald was a communist. Records show that CIA thought Cubans were definitely involved and possibly the Soviets. James Angleton of the CIA kept a Soviet defector, who claimed the Soviets had nothing to do with the assassination, in solitary confinement for years trying to get him to confess that he was a Soviet plant and that Oswald was a soviet agent. Win Scott, the CIA chief in Mexico believed the Cubans were involved. There are many questions still unanswered and I don’t think simply saying that “since the CIA covered up the fact that Oswald was not a lone gunman they must have been involved in the plot” is a sufficient answer.

Larry

October 15, 2012 at 1:34 pm

Despite having been altered, the Altgens #6 photo clearly shows an “Oswald” in the doorway of the TSBD at the precise time JFK is being struck by a bullet (Z255) Case closed. The Lovelady caper has been thoroughly addressed and his presence in the doorway discredited by early researchers Meagher, Wiesberg, Schaeffer, J Johnson, etc. We now know why Lovelady lied about being “doorman” and why, under duress, he changed his story about the shirt he wore on 11/22/63.

His record while in the Air Force stinks to high heaven, and recently released, non redacted documents confirm his felonious gun running activities at Andrews Air Force Base, and his subsequent flight from Maryland which culminated in his being arrested and incarcerated right at his job at the TSBD in early January 1963. According to established FBI records now available, he had been on the lam for at least an entire year. He was a perfect candidate for an alternate patsy, and who knows how close he might have been to being in Oswald’s shoes!

What I am saying is the Warren Commission is untenable and if Oswald had stood trial, he likely would have been acquitted. And this is why I think he was shot.

The problem today is trying to fit together what actually did happen. With these 2 million pages of new documents, they help. The problem is, who has read them? Not O’Reilly or Dugard.

So how does their book have any credibility?

Joseph E. Green

October 16, 2012 at 10:05 pm

This is a terrific and incisive article and gives just as much attention as required to dismiss this ludicrous book. There are many fine books on the Kennedy assassination and alas we are going to get several more bad ones in the coming year. The 50th, I believe, will represent the last chance to galvanize the country in one direction or the other, and both sides know it.

James

October 19, 2012 at 3:06 am

On page 313 is this dedication? Does that strike anyone as a bit synchronistic? My first thought when I heard that this book was of the dishonest variety was, “Might Bill O. try to placed coded messages for insiders anywhere since hs reputation as a Kennedy conspiracy sleuth is well known?”

Now I wonder if there are meta-narratives to this inexplicable charade on behalf of the Establishment to carry this tune for so long. I wonder, even if the thought is strange, that the larger story is purposefully mysterious in the same way that certain masonic secrets are kept with intention. Could it be that when Bill O. was ganted exclusive charter as one of the few Guardians of the western civilization scheme, depraved as it is, that he must also take on the burden of silence that accompanies the true knowledge that lies beneath the propaganda landscape?

When studying the Kennedy issue, I cannot help but also ponder the larger hoaxes that vex the publc, such as the Apollo PR fiasco, and the current war on terror that conveniently displaced the former war on communism. While it is becoming more mainstream to assert the truth with JFK, it is more rare to see free and liberal thinkers to ponder the logical inferences that accompany the wider swath of false hstory as presented to us, the Proletarian fool public.

We see crimes in disparate places, and we attribute malice to abstract institutions like the CIA, all while continuing in a blind mission to uphold the facade of our thinky veiled tyranny, with a kind of socially agreed upon amnesia to the historical antecedants thst clearly reveal our status as victims of a great ontological crime.

We think we are born as citizens with rights, but we are truly born as consumers with privileges granted by an unseen oligarchy. And who among us will combine to end this great evil?

Colleen McGuire

October 19, 2012 at 3:31 am

THANK YOU JIM for another excellent review. It spurred me to track down Martin Dugard’s Facebook page and send him a message. I took the liberty of excerpting some of your words. Here’s what I wrote him:

Dear Martin,

I loved your book Into Africa and passed it around to soooo many friends. I regarded you as an ace writer.

Martin, you’ve fallen from my pedestal. How on earth can you write a book about the JFK assassination and omit the crucial Zapruder film showing Kennedyâ€™s entire body rocketing BACKWARD with such force and speed that it bounces off the back seat. Such an effect cannot possibly be produced by a bullet shot from behind, (i.e., the Texas Book Depository).

I’m sorry to say but I now suspect your critical thinking skills are on a level akin to the Rodney King jury.

There are other grave omissions and deceits in your book, such as Oswald is a “crack shot.” This claim is not even supported by the Warren Report or at least the references you site in your book don’t come near elevating Oswald to a crack shot — and interviews iwth his Marine buddies reveal them laughing at the very thought.

Martin, my former hero, did you need the money that bad to distort history so egregiously?

Colleen McGuire, NYC

Francois Carlier

October 20, 2012 at 3:26 am

My God ! Is this the meeting place for all the deluded conspiracy believers ? Poor Jim DiEugenio, a true example of an embittered, gullible and close-minded man, lives in a dream world. Absolutely ignorant of critical thinking (he doesn’t even know what it is) he has wasted years of his life on a wild-goose chase. And now, he would like everybody to follow him in his universe of fiction, a totally useless and nonsensical journey.
The truth is very simple : Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy in Dallas, on November 22, 1963. Pure and simple. Every sane person knows it. Science has proved it beyond any doubt. The evidence is overwhelming. The list of sane, reasonable, honest and intelligent people who have written on the case is very long : John McAdams, Gerald Posner, David Von Pein, Vincent Bugliosi, Larry Sturdivan, Mey Ayton, myself, Dale Myers, and so many others.
Oswald’s sole guilt is a fact. Go ahead, read the books !
My own book gives hundreds of arguments to prove it. And it destroys conspiracy theorists (such as poor DiEugenio). [Of course, I can’t list all my arguments here, since they take more than 700 pages in my book, but it is very easy for the reader here to visit the Internet and learn tons of arguments proving at length that Oswald was guilty and DiEugenio is a crook).
But of course, people are free to say whatever they feel like, and DiEugenio uses that freedom to spread disinformation and his nonsensical dreams.
DiEugenio leads his readers astray. That’s how he chose to live his life…
And he is angry because Bill O’Reilly (who is telling you the truth) has a million times more success than he, DiEugenio (who is telling you lies).
I’ll just say this. By all means, read all James DiEugenio has to say. Read his articles. Read his book. See him spread his venom everywhere. And then, do yourself a favor : read articles and books by defenders of the truth : you’ll find reason, facts, common sense, logic, critical thinking, and the simple truth, all things missing in all the DiEugenio’s useless production.http://facts-carlier-jfk-assassination.blogspot.fr/

elmerfudzie

October 21, 2012 at 1:43 pm

Frankly, I could care less what Bill Oâ€™Reilly says, does, thinks or writes. However, I did enjoy the article. This creates somewhat of a theological crisis for me because Jim DiEugenio managed to fashion something good and true from sources that are utterly false and malignant!

BeezKneez

October 24, 2012 at 6:46 pm

I am amazed at how far leftists will go to protect one of their own. Oswald was the shooter. He was a petty little egomaniac who wanted to achieve fame. End of story.